Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself

The Detroit producer's third proper album is a love letter to a few things Omar pretends not to care about: his fans, his hometown, and house music. Here, he berates us with kindness, offering wistful, major-key tracks out of step with his reputation for hissy lo-fi concoctions.

Like your grandfather or your youth football coach, Omar S grouses to conceal the fact that he's growing softer and more loving. There's a reason for the enigmatic Detroit producer's tough love: to keep us sharp, to beat into our heads that we're a bunch of namby-pambies falling for the same old soulless bullshit. Omar's testy, industry-averse persona has always been at odds with his genre's M.O., which is basically to play nice with others both musically and otherwise-- call him a pioneer in the harumph-house movement. His fourth proper album, Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself is a love letter to a few things Omar pretends not to care about: his fans, his hometown, and house music.

On 2011's It Can Be Done But Only I Can Do It, Omar unleashed the biggest hit of his career in "Here's Your Trance Now Dance", 10 minutes of find-your-core, light-bright synthesizers more anthemic-- or maybe just happier-- than anything else in Omar's catalog. It wasn't all love, though, as It Can Be Done also featured a track of continuously sampled hardcore pornography that is not to be spun if you share a wall with neighbors. Thank You learns from "Trance"'s success, berating us with kindness, offering wistful, major-key tracks out of step with Omar's reputation for hissy lo-fi concoctions.

It feels like a change in direction for an artist whose blocky, proto-house compositions resembled Kraftwerk as often as, say, Derrick Carter, and parts of Thank You feel like homages to classic house tropes. "The Shit Baby" features a deft, familiar piano solo. "Rewind" is salty, low-overhead R&B. "Air of the Day" unfurls slowly, spreading slowly evolving pads over a hearty bassline and ratcheting up a level with staccato synth blasts in its final minute. The album's title rings true because Omar is an artist for whom fans do suffer inconvenience-- namely poor distribution and limited runs.

Instances of Omar's crankiness come off as mere window dressing or, better yet, good-natured fun. Omar peppers the album with snippets of chiding dialogue; upon the announcement of Thank You when asked about cover art, he replied "Only a momma's boy cares about artwork!!" The resulting art-- of Omar nonchalantly kneeling (above), then standing next to a Corvette-- does not rule out the possibility that he'd simply forgotten he needed album art. If you still need proof of Omar's softening, though, look no further than closer "Its Money in the D" [sic] ("The D" being local slang for Detroit), eight minutes of sun-spackled funk and stoned electric piano that drift aimlessly upward. For a few minutes the fact that it is certainly not "money in the D" matters little, and the track cements Thank You as an enjoyable, begrudging concession: feel-good music from a feel-bad guy.